The Master of Computational Science

The Master of Computational Science is a two-year master’s programme, that is open to students from many different backgrounds. Some knowledge of Mathematics and Programming is required, although a Minor is available for students who lack that knowledge. During the master’s programme, students learn how to create a computational model based on real-life data, but also how to perform experiments with such models, how to analyse these results and make predictions, and to present these results in a scientific paper or an oral presentation. 

Since all students come from very different backgrounds, they start with different skill-sets and may have different interest. The master’s programme provides a set of core courses (24EC), ensuring that all the students have a basic level of knowledge regarding Mathematics, Computer Science, Modelling and Simulation. Aside from these core courses, there is a set of restricted choice courses (30EC), where students can choose from a set of predetermined courses, and elective choice courses (24EC), allowing the students to specialize in whichever area they are interested in. Finally, the students have to do an individual Graduation Research Project (42EC), which can be done at a research group at a university or at a company, and write a thesis based on this project. Again, students are allowed to find a project in whichever field they are interested in, as long as it involves Computational Science.

At the end of their master’s, all students have the same core knowledge of Mathematics and Computer Science. Nonetheless, since everyone has a different background and has followed an individual study plan, each student has a different specialised skill-set. They are ready for a job in research, or, for example, as a data analyst, data consultant or data scientist. 

The purpose of this website

This website was made for the accreditation of the Master of Computational Science in 2019. Any degree in the Netherlands is accredited every 6 years. This process is made to ensure that education quality is up to standards. As part of the accreditation, students are asked to create an independent chapter, to write about their experiences with the programme. As the students who volunteered for the writing team, we chose to do this in the form of a website, because we would like this to not only be used for the accreditation, but also to show prospective students our honest opinions about the programme. We included the stories of three students (including our own), as well as three alumni. Furthermore, a survey was sent to all the current students, a summary can be found on this site. Finally, we summarized all our findings by listing the strenghts and weaknesses, and show some of the students’ projects.

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